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When Andy Yan talks about the housing crisis in Vancouver, he uses value-laden words such as “citizenship,” “courage” and “sacrifice” as he describes how to make sure this place doesn’t become a “zombie” city in which people are indifferent to each other.

The Vancouver-raised urban planner has become the go-to man on the hot subjects of housing unaffordability, empty condos and the “problems and opportunities of money flowing all around the world,” which is making this West Coast city unique.

And not necessarily unique in a good way.

Metro Vancouver may be developing into a “resort economy,” he says, in which many people who own property in Metro Vancouver for the most part do not live here.

This creates a scenario of rootlessness, in which many of those who work in the city can’t afford to stay or especially to raise families, says Yan, who teaches urban planning at the University of B.C. and researches for Vancouver’s internationally renowned Bing Thom Architects.

High real estate and living costs, plus tepid wages, means Vancouver is losing talented young people to more affordable places such as Calgary and New York, Yan says. Local businesses, universities and medical centres are unable to attract top employees.

Yan — whose great-grandfather arrived in Vancouver about a century ago — has some ideas for how to handle the emerging problems in this city to which he feels so committed.

But the first thing Yan wants governments and the development industry to focus on is making accessible better data on housing and ownership trends.

Yan has worked and taught in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere. He wonders why more B.C. politicians, realtors, academics and business people don’t follow global leaders in making real estate data “a lot more open, detailed and accessible.”

Yan has had to find innovative ways to do his own sleuthing. And one important socioeconomic fact he has discovered is that Metro Vancouver has one of the lowest rates on the continent of residents who are locally born.

Only one-third of the residents of Vancouver, Richmond and Burnaby were born in British Columbia, with the rest from a multitude of homelands, from Winnipeg to Shanghai.

“We’re a city from everywhere,” he says. “We’re more extreme in that than the mass majority of cities in Canada or the U.S.”

Residents of Vancouver tend to have shallower roots than those in, for instance, New York City, where half were born in New York state.

Even in Los Angeles, which is seen as having a highly migrant population, 42 per cent of residents are born in California. Montreal is also a magnet for immigrants. But, still, Yan found two out of three Montreal residents were born in Quebec.

One of the few Canadian researchers doing work similar to Yan is University of B.C. geographer Dan Hiebert. Hiebert recently projected that by 2031, only one out of four Metro Vancouver residents will have grandparents born in Canada.

That will make Metro Vancouver unlike any other city in North America or Europe, Hiebert says.

What can Metro residents do about what Yan calls a widespread “insecurity of belonging?”

Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City, called Vancouver a “consumer city.” But there is a crucial difference between being a “consumer” (including one who can afford to buy a property and not live in it) and being a “citizen,” Yan says.

“We are being given the profound challenge of making strangers from all over the planet into citizens.”

Working with sample data he dug up in part from the province, Yan has also discovered that 50 to 60 per cent of downtown condos are not inhabited by their owners.

They’re owned by investors, many of whom are holding on while wishing their value will rise.

Many of these investor-owned condos are rented out, says Yan, which can be positive in Vancouver’s tight rental markets. But they’re not affordable for most.

In addition, roughly 15 per cent of the downtown condos Yan studied were either empty or occupied by non-permanent residents. These “non-resident-occupied” condos fail to contribute to a vibrant community or support businesses.

Yan notes how empty the streets often are around the luxury towers of Coal Harbour, where one in four condos are non-resident occupied.

Is Vancouver already becoming, he wonders, like the resort town of Whistler — catering to an unusually high extent to visitors? Or worse yet, are the young, ambitious and talented in Vancouver becoming the “temporary visitors?”

Some representatives of the real estate industry have long suggested that anybody that raises questions about foreign ownership of Metro property could well be labelled a racist.

But Yan believes this name-calling is misguided. It shuts down genuine curiosity and a civil conversation about what is happening to the city, which Demographia has ranked the second-most unaffordable city out of 325 around the world.

“Whispers of racism should never be used to silence a desperately needed dialogue on the necessary actions to create a sustainable, livable, and just city”, he says.

Unlike most countries, Canada does not keep records on foreign ownership, but there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that foreign buyers make up a large proportion of the speculators in Metro Vancouver real estate.

Yan, however, suggests housing affordability is not just about foreign ownership. The key issue is simply property speculation and investment, whether the non-resident owner is “from Calgary or Shanghai.”

Yan admires “risk-takers.” He doesn’t want to stop all real estate speculation. But he does believe B.C. and Canada need to develop “instruments” to better reduce the kind of speculation that is contributing to Metro — especially the city of Vancouver — becoming unaffordable.

Other jurisdictions — such as Australia, Singapore and China — are well ahead of Canada and B.C. in regulating real estate speculation, Yan says. They’ve already found ways to limit it, so that residents and workers aren’t pushed out.

Even though Yan says Metro Vancouver and provincial policy-makers can learn from such jurisdictions, he also thinks they can come up with “made-in-Vancouver solutions.”

Those solutions, he cautions, will take some “courage.”

What are some options available?

Yan believes one way to discourage empty condos and houses in Metro Vancouver is to “modernize” already-existing “instruments” such as property-transfer fees, homeowner grants and property taxes.

The property-transfer tax, for instance, can be adjusted to discourage reckless non-resident property speculation and “flipping,” in which buyers sell dwellings after a short time to make quick profits, Yan says.

To emphasize the need for reform, Yan pointed to Vancouver Sun business columnist Don Cayo, who wrote this week that an untold number of wealthy investors have found loopholes to completely bypass the B.C. property-transfer tax. Cayo called it “scandalous.”

Although Yan supports “thoughtful densification” measures to increase the housing supply, he also suggests more intangible attitudes might also be necessary to solve the affordability crisis.

Since many of Metro Vancouver’s baby-boomers are asking, “How can I get my kid into the housing market?” Yan wonders if part of the answer might be that they start “showing a spirit of sacrifice.”

Yan asks whether current homeowners are ready to sacrifice some of their housing profits, or personal comforts, through various policy changes to allow young people to enter the market and raise families.

Yan’s ultimate goal is to make sure Metro, especially the City of Vancouver, doesn’t become a “zombie city,” in which most owners and residents feel like rootless consumers; temporary and indifferent to each other.

As a third-generation Vancouverite, Yan wants a city that has a soul. “When people feel they belong, they create very strong communities because they feel like this is home.”

That requires having more residents who live and work in the same community, trust its institutions and feel their roots are solid and intertwined, says Yan.

They’re the kind of people who tend to believe: “’I’m not going anywhere. I believe in this place. I’m going to fight for it.”

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